Orbital Path with Michelle Thaller takes a look at the big questions of the cosmos and what the answers can reveal about our life here on Earth. From podcast powerhouse PRX, with support from the Sloan Foundation.

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Asteroids, as the dinosaurs found out, can have big effects on life on Earth.

Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid crashed into the Yucatán. The impact caused apocalyptic tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. Grit and ash blotted out the sun. It wiped out species that had roamed the Earth for millions of years.

Yet asteroid hits also were critical to the origins of life on Earth. Asteroids may well have been the bringers of water, of carbon, even of amino acids — the building blocks of life.

That’s a big reason why NASA is on a mission to Bennu. This asteroid is like an ancient fossil of our solar system — largely unchanged since the time the planets formed.

In December, after a billion-mile journey, NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission arrives at Bennu. And, for the first time, a spacecraft will try to actually bring back an asteroid sample to Earth.

On this episode of Orbital Path, Dr. Michelle Thaller sits down with Dr. Amy Simon — a senior scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and a key player on the Osiris-Rex mission. Michelle and Amy talk about the mission, Amy’s work to probe the origins of the solar system, and one other thing:

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Looking through a telescope is like being inside a time machine -- you are seeing light from the past. And some space telescopes allow astronomers to see light that is billions of years old and existed before there was an Earth or sun. Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller introduces us to scientists who started two of the most powerful telescopes, the Hubble, which launched 25 years ago, and the James Webb Space Telescope, being built right now.

Looking through a telescope is like being inside a time machine -- you are seeing light from the past. And some space telescopes allow astronomers to see light that is billions of years old and existed before there was an Earth or sun. Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller introduces us to scientists who started two of the most powerful telescopes, the Hubble, which launched 25 years ago, and the James Webb Space Telescope, being built right now.

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Space scientists are acutely aware of what can happen when climates change in other parts of our solar system. Take Venus, where it rains sulfuric acid and is 900°F on the surface, but it wasn’t always that way. Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller talks with a NASA expert on Venus about how the planet became a hellscape. And she talks with the Library of Congress’ inaugural chair of astrobiology about how to grasp this new geologic era where humans cause rapid change.

Space scientists are acutely aware of what can happen when climates change in other parts of our solar system. Take Venus, where it rains sulfuric acid and is 900°F on the surface, but it wasn’t always that way. Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller talks with a NASA expert on Venus about how the planet became a hellscape. And she talks with the Library of Congress’ inaugural chair of astrobiology about how to grasp this new geologic era where humans cause rapid change.

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We're closer than ever before to discovering if we're not alone in the universe. The host for this episode of Transistor, astrophysicist Michelle Thaller, visits the NASA lab that discovered that comets contain some of the very same chemical elements that we contain. Then, Michelle talks to a Vatican planetary scientist about how science and religion can meet on the topic of life beyond Earth.

We're closer than ever before to discovering if we're not alone in the universe. The host for this episode of Transistor, astrophysicist Michelle Thaller, visits the NASA lab that discovered that comets contain some of the very same chemical elements that we contain. Then, Michelle talks to a Vatican planetary scientist about how science and religion can meet on the topic of life beyond Earth.

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“That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.” We all know the quote, the triumphant story. It seems written in stone. But Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong came within inches of tragedy when they landed Apollo 11. Moon Grafitti imagines what it might have sounded like if things had gone a little differently. Based on a contingency speech written by William Safire for Richard Nixon titled “In the Event of Moon Disaster.”

We're still experimenting with how to best format our series. If you would like to air this piece without our host intro, credits, or sonic ID, we are more than happy to make a different version that would better suit your needs (and we'll do it quickly!). Please let us know what you think, we are always looking for ways to make our show better.

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It was the summer of 1966 when a persistent 17-year-old with a high school radio show near Chicago got the interview of lifetime: Muhammad Ali. But only a handful of people ever got to hear this time capsule. Until now.

“There were so many fellows ranked over me I couldn’t just whoop them all. I had to out-shadow them by talking.” - Muhammad Ali, 1966

It was in the summer of 1966 when a star-struck 17-year-old set out to interview his idol: Muhammad Ali. Twenty miles from the South Side of Chicago, in Winnetka, Ill., Michael Aisner was calling repeatedly to the gym where the boxing champ was training. Finally, a man named Mr. Shabazz — Jeremiah Shabazz, he suspects, the man who introduced Ali to Islam — picked up.“Where are you from?” Shabazz asked the boy.

“I’m from WNTH, a high school radio station,” Aisner said.”The champ doesn’t have time to talk,” he said.

Aisner called back two days later. And then two days after that.

“Can I interview the champ?” he asked again.

Finally, Shabazz relented.

“Ok,” he told him. “The champ will meet you.”

Later that week, with a suitcase-sized tape recorder in a back seat, Aisner and his best friend Pat were driving from the northern suburbs of Chicago to the South Side of Chicago, where Ali’s fan club was headquartered. It was two years after Ali had trashed talked his way into a victory over Sonny Liston; a year before he would refuse to go Vietnam. At the time, many black Muslims, led by Malcolm X, were advocating for “total separation” of the races. And so, for a scrawny white boy from the suburbs, heading to the heart of Chicago’s gritty South Side was no small thing.

“We parked as close as we could to the building,” Aisner, now 63, laughs. “White Jewish boys from the suburbs did not go to the south side of Chicago.”

The Muhammad Ali fan club was housed in a small brick building on X street, a gold foil sign announcing itself out front. Next door was “Muhammad Speaks,” the black Muslim newspaper. From inside the club, Aisner and his friend watched out the front window as Ali screetched up in a red Cadillac convertible, parked in front of a fire hydrant, and jumped over the car door.For the next 20 minutes, Ali talked boxing, footwork, why he wanted to fight — and launched into an epic, unprompted riff about traveling to Mars and fighting for the intergalactic boxing title. All went smoothly — until Aisner realized he’d forgot to turn on the tape recorder.

“I was mortified,” he says. “I said, ‘Champ, do you think you could do that again?’”

The champ obliged.

The interview aired a few weeks later, and Aisner went on to produce a radio show and a documentary in the decades since. But he’s never quite forgotten that first interview with his childhood icon. For 25 years, he kept the original reel-to-reel recording until he digitized it. But it sat. No one else ever heard it.

Then Aisner heard about Blank on Blank. And brought his interview of a lifetime back to life.

NASA is figuring out how to take the next great leap into space. The difficulty is, if we leap to Mars, we might not make it back. This piece was produced in Summer of 2009. Since then the Constellation project mentioned, but not explored in any great detail in the piece, has been scrapped. The technical challenges and existential quandry are still quite relevant.

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In this episode, host Gabriel Spitzer considers what science has to learn from flying saucers, what it might take for humans to colonize space in our lifetimes, and how a very clever ape helped launch the space race.

Few things have changed humanity’s self-image in quite the same way as human space travel. Whether it’s seeing that famous image of the blue-green ball spinning through blackness or the rise of UFO sightings, reaching space has rejiggered how we imagine our place in the universe.

We begin this installment of Clever Apes with a remembrance of J. Allen Hynek, perhaps the best-known American ufologist … or at least, the best-known ufologist with an actual science background. He chaired the astronomy department at Northwestern University, and worked as a consultant on the Air Force’s official UFO investigation, Project Blue Book. Along the way, he transformed from skeptic to believer. As a debunker, he was the first person to write off UFO sightings as “swamp gas.” Later, as a full-throated UFO enthusiast, he invented the “close encounters” classification system. Incidentally, he consulted on Steven Spielberg’s movie, and even has a cameo.

Next we consider what it would take to kickstart human settlement of space, and along the way we ask what it takes to get people to do big things. I mean really big. Like build a 10,000-person space colony within the next 10 years or so. Anita Gale is an engineer at Boeing who works on the space shuttle program, and she’s done some deep thinking about those questions. She also runs a contest for high school kids to design a plausible space settlement. We caught up with her at the International Space Development Conference in Rosemont, Illinois, to talk space real estate.

Finally, we honor the contributions of one very clever ape to the space program. Fifty years ago, HAM the Astrochimp became the first ape in space.

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Join us for an interesting and fun conversation with planetary astronomer, Alessondra Springmann. She’s working on NASA’s Osiris project and could be one of the first to confirm an asteroid is on a trajectory to hit Earth. Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine. Plus, we have more guests from outer space! And the news and a quiz of striking not-difficulty. All you have to do is click the little play arrow and blast off!

Join us for an interesting and fun conversation with planetary astronomer, Alessondra Springmann. She’s working on NASA’s Osiris project and could be one of the first to confirm an asteroid is on a trajectory to hit Earth. Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine. Plus, we have more guests from outer space! And the news and a quiz of striking not-difficulty. All you have to do is click the little play arrow and blast off!

Indiana Jones meets Star Trek in the field of space archaeology. Satellites scan ancient ruins so that scientists can map them without disturbing one grain of sand. Discover how some archaeologists forsake their spades and brushes in favor of examining historic sites from hundreds of miles high.

Also, if you were to hunt for alien artifacts – what would you look for? Why ET might choose to send snail mail rather than a radio signal.

Plus, the culture of the hardware we send into space, and roaming the Earth, the moon, and Mars the Google way.

As part of the Guardian's coverage of the final mission of the shuttle Atlantis, STS 135, Science Weekly hitches an oral and acoustic ride on the shuttle. Ian Sample spoke to two shuttle veterans, the Anglo-American meteorologist Piers Sellers and former US army test pilot Scott Altman.

Both men discuss the visceral experience of a shuttle launch and the day-to-day experience of entering orbit, docking with the International Space Station and finally re-entering the atmosphere on the shuttle's return to Earth.

On the 12 April 1981, Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral. It was the first shuttle to go into space.

Thirty years on, the shuttle fleet is finally being taken out of service. The three remaining shuttles - Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour - each have one mission left.

At the time of recording, Nasa has scheduled STS-133 for 24 February: Discovery is destined for the international space station.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Dr Jeffrey Hoffman flew five times on the shuttle - he was the first astronaut to log more than a thousand hours of flight time on board and travelled more than 20 million miles in space.

But as this era of spaceflight comes to a close, what is the shuttle's legacy and what's next for human spaceflight?

We spoke to Jeff from his new workplace, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT.

In 1969, humans landed on the Moon. But why? Why did we go? Look at anything with the perspective of decades and it can seem inevitable. How often do we ever stop, look the things around us and ask: How did it get that way? When it comes to the question: Why did we go to the Moon, the answer has a little bit to do with science and a lot to do with politics. In this program we learn how the Democrats rode Sputnik to the White House in a campaign that forever changed science, technology and academia in America.

This program is the story of women in the ultimate Man’s World – the labs and Shuttle crew cabins of NASA. Told in the first person, these stories explore the experiences of NASA’s first woman engineers and scientists and its first astronauts. It also tells the fascinating story of a group of women pilots who – in the early 1960s – were led to believe that they would be America’s first women astronauts and were given the exact same physical tests are the Mercury astronauts. The program is narrated by Eileen Collins, the first woman commander of a Space Shuttle.

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The hard part is over: we landed on Mars (again!). Let the science begin. Here’s the latest in the hunt for evidence of life off Earth, and one man’s plan to set up a Martian colony. A show for the Curiosity-minded.

We dig the Red Planet! And so does Curiosity. After a successful landing, and a round of high-fives at NASA, the latest rover to land on Mars is on the move, shovel in mechanical hand.

Discover how the Mars Science Laboratory will hunt for the building blocks of life, and just what the heck a lipid is. Plus, how to distinguish Martians from Earthlings, and the tricks Mars has played on us in the past (canals, anyone?).

Also, want to visit Mars firsthand? We can point you to the sign-up sheet for a manned mission. The catch: the ticket is one-way.